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Improving server efficiency to ensure a quality gaming experience for Vizor Games

Improving server efficiency to ensure a quality gaming experience for Vizor Games

Since its launch in 2007, Vizor Games has been creating games that last.

Built on the founding principle that it only develops games its own team enjoy playing, the company has seen success with the likes of Klondike: The Lost Expedition (the game that pioneered the expedition genre), Klondike Adventures, Atlantis Odyssey and Knights and Brides. With its games boasting millions of players worldwide, Vizor Games has cemented its reputation as a developer of quality games. 

And it doesn’t want to stand still. The Vizor Games team is always looking to try new things, meaning the list of games it’s developing is regularly growing. Famous for its mobile and social network games, it has expanded its remit in recent years to develop large-scale cross-platform projects.

Vizor Games’ success has led to a growth in the number of players wanting to play its games and consequently a resulting increase in load on its gaming servers.

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“We use servers.com as our preferred hosting provider in the United States – specifically their data center in Washington D.C. – for three main reasons: convenience, the comprehensive list of features they provide, and the cost-effectiveness of the service.”

The challenge

 “Player experience is our number one priority. We put a lot of time and energy into creating games that we are proud of, and the quality of the gaming experience needs to reflect that. Ensuring stable operation and high availability of the servers on which our games are hosted is key to effectively maintaining a positive player experience. It’s why we choose to use dedicated bare metal servers to run our applications,” said Vladimir Valenteychik, project manager at Vizor Games.

“But we were facing a problem – if you can call having more players wanting to play your games a problem. The player experience that we pride ourselves on was at risk with the load on our servers increasing. We were struggling to balance our mobile game players between the servers because we were using Round-Robin DNS. The issue we had was that if we made any changes in the load balancing configuration it wouldn’t be applied instantly. The delay in the change taking place was inconveniencing players and we needed to adjust our approach.”

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“The team at servers.com has consistently provided great responsiveness from a support perspective, addressing day-to-day issues promptly. They have also delivered servers quickly, even when we need a lot of them.”

The solution

 “We have been a customer of servers.com for several years now. When we were originally looking for a hosting partner, we had positive personal recommendations from others in the industry about working with servers.com and we haven’t been disappointed. 

“We use servers.com as our preferred hosting provider in the United States – specifically their data center in Washington D.C. – for three main reasons: convenience, the comprehensive list of features they provide, and the cost-effectiveness of the service.

“servers.com has also been willing to work with us on adapting certain areas of their service to accommodate our specific needs. For example, we use a non-standard Linux operating system and wanted the ability to enter server rescue mode via the ssh-key as well as BTRFS support for server rescue mode. This allows us to achieve faster gaming server deployment speeds, which is an important part of our service to customers.

“So, when it came to needing a solution that could help us solve the load balancing challenge, we approached servers.com to see what they could do. They recommended their Load Balancer L4 product, and it has been the perfect solution for us. We are now able to better distribute traffic across the servers, reducing the demand from each machine to improve their efficiency.”

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“Ensuring stable operation and high availability of the servers on which our games are hosted is key to effectively maintaining a positive player experience. It’s why we choose to use dedicated bare metal servers to run our applications.”

The future

“We want to continue to create and deliver games that people love. Who we choose to partner with for our infrastructure will be a crucial piece in achieving that future.

“The team at servers.com has consistently provided great responsiveness from a support perspective, addressing day-to-day issues promptly. They have also delivered servers quickly, even when we need a lot of them. And if there are delays due to missing components, they offer us a better-quality option at no extra cost. We look forward to a successful future with servers.com by our side.”  

 If you are a game developer looking for a reliable, cost-effective infrastructure hosting provider, check out our gaming server solutions.

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